I’m not an expert on how to do this, but I know this is a problem. I want help figuring out solutions, so please get in touch with me if you can help with that. I will ignore defenders of the status quo.

More detail on the problem

We pump a lot of energy into making really cool presentations for conferences, and then, when the conference is over, a lot of times, that great content usually just disappears.

Or if it doesn’t disappear, we don’t do a good job of getting it out where more people can benefit from our work. Maybe there’s a zipfile with our slides on a page for our talk on the conference website afterwards.

Maybe the slides (without most of the commentary) will show up online in one of those flash widgets.

Or if you’re really lucky, a video recording of the presentation will show up. And that’s great. For example, Next Day Video records and edits the PyOhio presentations, and does fantastic work, but just a video is not sufficient for all audiences.

A video recording is great for some things, but not for others. It isn’t easy how to copy a URL mentioned in a video, for example, or copy-paste a block of code. Or bookmark something 25-minutes in.

Consider that for every person in your audience, over the next few years, there’s probably at least 10 or a hundred or maybe even a thousand people that will be doing searches online for the facts you’re covering right now.

A lot of those people might be brand new to the language or library. A lot of those people might not be native English speakers. And maybe they’re on slow internet connections too.

A few ideas to make this better

I have a few ideas for what to do, listed below, but I’m more interested in getting feedback from readers. So please, let me know how what you think we should do.

Anyhow, my ideas:

Require presenters to submit something like a paper, not just a stack of LOLCATS slides for their proposal.

Bundle the materials from the presenters as soon as possible and get those out on the web. The SAS Global Forum does this, and it is great. I have read nearly all the papers presented at their conferences, because they make it so easy to get their material, and because everybody is writing actual papers, not doing stream of consciousness performance art.

Use open formats for text. Avoid PDFs, power-point slide desks, and similar stuff like the plague. Take SEO to heart. Not because we want to sell advertising, but because we want to share our knowledge.

Encourage attendees to critically react to the presentations. Maybe even consider the presentation material as open-source. A presentation contains some code sample that confuses people in the audience, then people should rewrite that with something more intuitive and more obvious.